Crossing the River Read online

  We would find ourselves using “the cooler” to escape more than just the heat.

  In Penedo, I found that the simple act of speaking took a lot of thought. It was like doing a math problem every time you wanted to open your mouth.

  “They just know which words are masculine and which are feminine,” Peter said incredulously one day. “They don’t even have to think about it!”

  Every day in Brazil, I’d realize—after the fact—that I’d just said something ridiculous; and every day, I’d think how kind Brazilians are. They didn’t laugh. They didn’t deride. They might look momentarily confused, but it would pass as I blundered on and they teased out my meaning.

  How many times did I ask Iago, the ten-year-old boy next door, to return our cake, instead of the ball? How often did I tell Bentinho, our newfound capoeira teacher, that I needed to sit and rot, instead of stretch? Funnier still, Peter, early in his Penedo soccer career, got hit with a ball in the groin and groaned, “Minhas castanhas!”—My cashews!—thinking castanhas was the word for nuts. Who knows if they even use that slang?

  It turns out they use a number of English words, but with a Portuguese twist. They add a long e at the end, and in Portuguese, an r at the beginning of a word is pronounced like an h. Together this results in great transformations, like hockey ee holy: rock and roll.

  In Portuguese, when you say, “I am,” you need to distinguish between “I (temporarily) am” and “I (permanently) am,” because you use different words depending on your state of being. Thus, “I am—eu sou—(permanently) a woman,” but “I am—eu estou—(temporarily) tired.” I could never think fast enough which one I needed, so I unconsciously settled on always using the temporary. I was temporarily Molly and Skyler’s mother; I was temporarily American; and my house was temporarily there, i.e., tomorrow it might be gone. This choice was probably a reflection of just how tenuous our life there felt to me in general.

  By the end of August, two months into our time in Penedo, we were wondering if it was worth it.

  One day, I was sitting at my little corner desk in our front room, which we’d dubbed “the garden room” for its wicker couches and giant plants, finally getting down to work. I’d given myself the first months to get situated in this new place, but now I needed to turn at least some of my focus back to my work from home. After twenty years of teaching, I’d retired from the university two years before. I had wanted to focus on running my dance company, Headwaters Dance Co., which I’d separated from the university several years earlier, and I had wanted more flexibility in my days for the last years before Molly left for college.

  While I’d founded the dance company with a colleague under the auspices of the university, when my partner decided she no longer wanted to share in directing the troupe, I pulled it off campus. I thought that if I were going to continue to direct it on my own, it would be more efficient to run it as a nonprofit. When I announced my intention to separate the company from the university, the university’s legal advisor threatened me, saying, “You’ll never last a year out there,” as though I were heading out into the jungle without food or shelter. I’ll show you, I’d thought. It had been five years, and while the company was surviving, it had begun to suck the air out of my lungs. I loved my volunteer board, but despite their enthusiasm and generosity, in the end, I was the grant writer, fundraiser, marketer, company manager, choreographer, and rehearsal director—and, don’t forget, someone had to launder the costumes and paint the sets. And through it all, we weren’t making enough for me to really get paid. Something needed to change. My intention was to use this year of hiatus to shore up the company’s finances by continuing to write grants and send out fundraising appeals, things I could do long distance, over the Internet. Perhaps I could build up a cushion, reduce some of the stress of gambling every year that I’d be able to pull off another season. I admit on that day in August in Penedo, fundraising was the last thing I wanted to think about. I really just wanted a total break.

  I was pulled out of my reverie when Skyler slammed open our metal front door, slumped in, and silently disappeared into the bedroom he and Molly shared. Molly dragged through the same door a half hour later, looking hot and exhausted. One more day of school down. School that Skyler hated, with its interminable hours of sitting and understanding nothing. Of greater concern, he seemed to be developing an alarming self-loathing.

  “I can’t do anything I used to. I can’t run fast anymore. I suck at math.” Each time he made a misstep on the futsal court, he was convinced anew that “they hate me now.” This was not shaping up to be the confidence-building, look-how-I-can-cope-with-challenges experience that Peter and I had hoped for. We tried to reassure him that it would surely get better, as soon as he could speak a little more Portuguese.

  “Well, since I have no friends, I might as well find a hobby,” Molly announced as she rounded the corner and collapsed into the orange-and-green hammock hitched to the wall behind my desk. The circle of girls that had picked her up in class were great while at school, but Molly’s lack of language made it hard to include her in their after-school social life. “I’ve always wanted to bake. I like to paint. I’m not very good at it, but I like it.”

  I dug some money out of my bedside table, and we promptly crossed the praça and spent sixty dollars for art supplies at the papelaria. At least she had a plan.

  Peter’s agent had just emailed to say that a book proposal of Peter’s, which had been making the rounds of New York publishing houses when we left, had been roundly rejected. It was the project he’d planned to work on while we were in Brazil. He began to wonder what he was doing there, began to have a hard time getting up in the morning. He was losing weight.

  Though I was struggling with my career, I seemed to be the only one in our family who wasn’t struggling with Brazil, and watching the rest of them was shaking my convictions.

  6

  “I Hate Brazil”

  WE WERE AN ANOMALY in this town and, as such, became instant celebrities, Os Americanos. No one, on meeting us, guessed we were American. Maybe Argentinean? French? Italian? Southern Brazilian? Anything that would explain our white skin in this largely darker-skinned place. Right away, people we barely knew told us they’d seen us: “in the morning in the market,” or “in the praça with your daughter,” or “you traveled to Carrapichu yesterday” (the town across the river). They frequently warned us about ladrão—robbers. “You shouldn’t carry that bag, there are ladrão.”

  “Por quê Penedo?” everyone wanted to know.

  Clearly, people found it curious that we would choose this town, but they were pleased, too. They liked their home and were flattered that Os Americanos had chosen it, out of all the possible places in Brazil.

  Peter and I weren’t so sure. We were questioning whether we’d chosen the right place after all; wondering how well life in this town—with no bookstore, no movie theater, no stoplight, no lane lines—was going to hold up; wondering whether we should not have listened to the kids, knowing as we did that total, unrelieved immersion could be hard, that it might mean no friends for them and surely none for us, that after the initial novelty wore off, it could be a year of spinning our wheels, lonely and tired of each other’s company. In short, it could be a disaster.

  Two months in, “I hate Brazil” had become Skyler’s mantra.

  This was not what parents who had just moved to a foreign country for a year of cultural immersion wanted to hear. There we were, six thousand miles away from home, on a different continent, in an upriver town in rural Brazil. Peter and I were not thrilled about bagging it all just because the place wasn’t to Skyler’s taste. On the other hand . . .

  “Why do you hate it?” I asked, trying not to sound frustrated. The kids and I were crossing the praça in front of our house on our way to a sorveteria, an ice cream shop. A tinny, cavernous bus rattled over the cobblestones in front of us as we were about to step off the curb. It passed, and the little sorveteria
reappeared across the street, bright blue with white art deco trim.

  “They’re mean. Brazilians are mean. They tease you, they say mean things, they taunt.” Skyler’s voice was rising in pitch.

  “I know what you’re saying, Skyler,” Molly chimed in. We’d entered the small shop, with its cluster of ironwork café tables. Molly was balancing a self-serve scoop in her right hand as she surveyed the bins of ice cream. “But I think it’s just their culture. They do it to everybody.”

  “How do they taunt?” I pursued as I scanned the names, wondering what they were—graviola, maracujá. I hadn’t experienced anything like taunting. I’d received nothing from the people of this small town but “Qualquér precisa”—Whatever you need. Was this just the difference between adult and kid lives anywhere?

  Skyler had become more tongue-tied, whether because of incipient adolescent hormones or the effort to straddle two languages, Portuguese and English, I didn’t know.

  Molly shrugged. “They’re just really direct. Like, they just say it, if they think someone is feio”—ugly—“or fat. They say it right in front of them. Like the other day, when I was walking with Ryan,”—Heon—“and Helene, she just said, ‘Molly, don’t you think Ryan is fat?’ What was I supposed to say?” She offered her bowl of ice cream to the woman at the counter to be weighed.

  “They just laugh at you if something bad happens, like if you fall down.” Skyler was warming up. “When you do something wrong in futsal”—Brazilian small-court soccer—“everybody yells at you. Everybody! I hate Brazilians.”

  Peter and I had carefully chosen Penedo because the kids—note, the kids—had requested immersion in a small town. Now, for better or worse, we were immersed. No international schools, no foreigners, no English.

  We finished our ice cream and headed back out into the eye-squinting sun. In August in Penedo, daily torrential rains alternated with cerulean skies. Given the humidity, one could see why plaster mildewed so fast and plants grew straight out of the walls.

  “Well, we don’t have to stay, you know. We can see how it goes,” I offered, wondering how readily we would really pull up stakes. “I think it’ll be easier when we can speak a little more.”

  “I doubt it,” Skyler mumbled, eyes downcast.

  “It’s hard when you don’t know what people are saying,” I continued, as we stepped off the high curb onto the cobblestones. “It’s easy to think they’re making fun of you when probably they’re not even talking about you at all.”

  In retrospect, for Skyler, this year was terrible timing; not the opportune moment to drop an increasingly self-conscious, prepubescent boy into a competitive, macho culture where he didn’t understand the social cues and couldn’t speak the language. How had we not foreseen it? I had thought about it, but I’d concluded it would be fine. After all, I had been twelve when my parents dropped me into a French school in Cairo, where I, too, couldn’t speak the language. But just because it turned out well for me didn’t mean it would for him. A twelve-year-old girl is not a twelve-year-old boy. Penedo is not Cairo.

  7

  Finding Our Guides

  GIOVANNI WOULD BECOME another of our guides, along with Zeca. Also twenty-six, he was the eldest son of Elizia, the school’s office manager, and when we asked for a Portuguese-language coach, the school’s director, Irma Francisca, recommended her assistant’s son.

  Giovanni had graduated from the school some years earlier and was now dismally working his way through law school in Arapiraca, the town with the trauma center, while also working as a technology specialist for a college there. Given his commuting schedule, it was no wonder that he was perpetually yawning. We set up private lessons. Peter, Molly, and I would each have an hour with him once a week in the courtyard at Imaculada. “Don’t you think I’m getting enough Portuguese, sitting in school four hours a day?” Skyler had said, exasperated, when we suggested extra lessons. I didn’t think we could push him any more than he was already being pushed. He was excused.

  Tall and burly, Giovanni was a light-skinned black man. “My great-grandfather was white,” he told me right after he’d said he was proud of his “people.” I had presumed his “people” were black, so I was interested he felt a need to tell me his great-grandfather had been white. We’d just been talking about race in Brazil, all the different terms, as I was trying to understand which were politically correct and which insulting: mulato, moreno, pardo, preto, amarelo, asiático . . . he hadn’t mentioned espânico, which is how I would have classified almost everyone I saw. Brazil is an amazing melting pot, but, as in the United States, the issue of racial prejudice continues to be troubling, and blacks and native Brazilians seem to be disproportionally denigrated. The kids and I, especially Skyler, would continue to try to sort it out over the coming months.

  I came to like Giovanni a lot. At first he seemed like Eeyore. He would sit across from me at the small stone table, perpetually rubbing his eyes, gaze down, consistently cynical. But after a few months, I found he could tell a very animated story, eyes alight, pausing for emphasis, laughing with delight at my surprise or indignation, and he was suddenly able to meet my eyes, looking for the reaction. He’d been transformed from Eeyore into a round-faced, laughing Buddha.

  “Really! Alagoas is at the very bottom?” I asked, having found that Giovanni was a great source for political, social, and economic statistics.

  He nodded emphatically. “We have the worst numbers in Brazil. Lowest income, highest poverty, highest unemployment, and highest illiteracy, although that’s improving.” (And this was the place we’d chosen for its old-world charm.)

  Eventually, however, I learned that Giovanni had a number of passionate interests: futebol—soccer—politics, social justice, and cars. One day, he brought a Matchbox car to my lesson. “These are my passion, and this is my favorite.” He gave the little white Mustang with the blue racing stripe a push with his index finger.

  He didn’t have much good to say about Brazil. I wondered if he felt ashamed of it, especially in comparison to the United States, at least the “United States” he knew from American TV and films. He’d watched more of those than I had, learning to speak most of his English that way.

  “I was born in the wrong place,” he sighed one day, although later he admitted anywhere would have its problems.

  I remembered the teenage boys in the village in Ghana, one of whom had bragged about a brother who, “born in the wrong place,” had “made it out”—to the South Bronx. I’d asked if the brother was happy. “Well . . .” he’d hesitated, and then he’d caught himself and listed all the things his brother had: a car, a job that paid ten dollars an hour. “A lot for Ghana,” I’d said, though it was not a lot for New York. “But is he happy?” I’d asked again. He’d conceded maybe he was a little lonely. Hmmm, and experiencing a little racism for the first time in his life, I’d thought. But his brother was adamant.

  One morning, I ran into Katia, the manager from the Pousada Colonial, on my daily trip down to the market. She mentioned that she had spoken to her cousin. “Aniete is worried about you, Dona Amy,” she said, looking concerned. “She says you were crying on your bench by the window.”

  How could I explain to Katia in my stilted Portuguese that Peter (whose book contract had not materialized) was depressed, Skyler hated school, and even Molly, usually a stalwart, was demoralized? How could I explain that this had all been my idea and I wasn’t sure I could hold everyone up? How could I explain my growing feelings of resentment, vying with guilt, vying with sympathy for my struggling family—and my confusion about what to do? How could I explain this to Aniete? Although, given that she was privy to our every move, she could probably explain it to herself.

  Aniete completed our trio of guides. Like Zeca and Giovanni, she, too, was twenty-six and, conveniently for us, was in need of a job. We’d housed a Brazilian exchange student back home in Montana the previous spring, and she’d told us, “In Brazil, everybody has an empregada—a h
ousehold helper.”

  Everybody with money, that is. Katia and her Aunt Laura clearly thought we belonged in that category. We agreed that Aniete would come in five days a week from seven in the morning until three and clean, wash clothes, and cook. It would cost us a mere $200 a month.

  Aniete had moved to the “city” from the family farm at sixteen, first to live with Katia and then Aunt Laura, with whom she still shared a bedroom. Under five feet tall, pretty and petite, she had a wide face and zipped lips that turned down whenever she felt uncertain, as when Peter was describing how to make something new for dinner.

  “Hoje, vamos fazer comida italiana . . . de China . . . de Tailândia . . . França . . . Americana,” he would say, flamboyantly waving his arms in our white-tiled kitchen as if to say, The world is at our fingertips! Aniete would look increasingly incredulous, raise a skeptical eyebrow, and turn her zipped lips down, but continue to listen.

  “É diferente,” she’d say, doubtfully eyeing another concoction of Peter’s, something exotic, like the pork chops in red cabbage he was holding out in the frying pan. How estranho! It became a daily what-wild-thing-are-we-going-to-make-next joke between them.

  When we said her cooking had been good, she’d light up with pleasure.

  “Sim? É bom?”—Yes? It’s good? her voice almost squeaking with relief.

  It would take months, but in time, adrenaline rushing, she would hold up yet another condensed milk pudding, just out of the oven. “Já invento,” she would say with pride. “I just invented it!” The “invention” would consist of something like the addition of a tablespoon of raisins. It seemed we’d opened up a whole new world of culinary improvisation, something that reached beyond northeastern Brazil’s staples of rice and beans, barely.

  Aniete slipped silently about the house, like smoke on the white-tile floor. The tile floors might not have creaked like our wood ones at home, but when I walked, my cartilage crackled; I guessed that was the difference between twenty-six and fifty-two.